The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

The quest for humanness

About a week ago WorldCoin arrived. For those who don’t know, it’s a Sam Altman – the OpenAI guy – joint whose premise invokes his on-brand optimism for artificial intelligence: AI is going to generate wealth and abundance for humanity… and in the process it’s going to wipe out a lot of jobs, which means we need to ensure that humans can still pay for things. WorldCoin’s answer is to use that new wealth to allocate to all people a universal basic income (UBI).

The project uses “orbs” – hardware dispersed around the world that scans your irises – that verify you’re a human and then places you into the UBI system. Decentralized governance is WorldCoin’s goal – though not its current reality – and there are, unsurprisingly, many complexities to consider, from privacy concerns to accessibility – which Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin details thoughtfully and at length – but it’s quite an experiment. Uniting the world behind our shared humanness is a lofty and unprecedented goal.

There’s a familiar sci-fi premise – see The Expanse, or Arrival (one of the best films ever made, in my humble opinion) – based on rallying behind the collective threat of human annihilation. It may be the only realistic prospect for which we’re willing to transcend the political interests of the nation-state. We might do well to view our shared climate crisis and the potential perils of AI as opportunities for such a unity (I’m not holding my breath), but regardless, WorldCoin’s goal underscores a familiar motif in this digital age of AI and saturated, scale-at-all-costs platforms: our authentic selves – from the fact of our shared humanness to our expression of its many foibles and flourishes – are the key to both our survival and our prosperity.

WorldCoin’s role is to verify the former – the fact of our humanness – and the latter, our foibles and flourishes, is the topic of interest today. As I’ve detailed several times in The Beat, creators are told that expressing their true selves – edges and all – is the key to breaking through the deafening noise of today’s infinite content streams. But when our means of expression is co-opted by massive ad-driven platforms that reward those who appeal to the largest possible audience, how can we even ensure our humanness, let alone our foibles and flourishes? How can we be our most – and entire – human selves?

The ease of non-effort

If the platforms through which we interact are shallow, shallow too shall we become, drugged by the inertia and misaligned incentives of our technocracy. The attention economy appeals to our most primitive brains – glib social validation, artificial scarcity, perpetual fomo, instant gratification – which makes us more one-dimensional, less interesting and apparently entitled to a misguided, anti-tryhard laziness.

An “omnipresence of ‘chill’ as a prepackaged descriptor” – as Catalog’s Alex Siber wrote recently – enables our tawdry digital behavior. “Something starts to feel different, though, when enough people confuse ease of use and ease of execution. The path of least resistance begins to resemble a Texas freeway at rush hour – everyone trying to get the most by doing the least. Punt mediocrity into the world, call it authentic, repeat.”

It’s the fallacy of the get-rich-quick scheme: psst, buy this shitcoin it’s about to go to the moon. Mine the gold before everyone else gets here. Buy those follower bots, or hey pay us $60 a month and we guarantee you 10,000 followers in the next 100 days, and all real people! Do that and then everyone else will know you’re worth following. Platforms are grifting us into acting out middle school social dynamics. And yet we do it, so eager to find the easy road even when we know finding it means that most people never will. It’s the doomed rationale of “yeah it’s shitty but that’s how the world works.”

Ok sure but how can we create a path toward a world where we don’t have to say that? We can’t change the fact that AI and Instagram exist, but we also can’t just give up and keep sliding down our hills of convenience. When expression itself, though surely an antidote to our growing aesthetic sameness, feels like too much effort, we’ve got a problem, and AI isn’t going to make that better. “Humanity feels disconnected from expression; there will be pictures, poems, and songs in the age of autophagous AI, but they will have little relation to human experience,” Tristra Newyear Yeager writes in an incredible analysis for MusicX. “Our models mapping experience to expressive acts have already collapsed.”

She’s not just pouring gas on the dumpster fire, though – Yeager proposes some creative solutions for ways in which creators can proactively and ethically engage with AI. My favorite idea is the dataset cooperative, where a group of artists train a model on their own music. Smaller, more intentional datasets are licensable – and thus revenue generating – and subvert the “drift towards mid,” that “aesthetic sameness” we already experience through algorithmic recommendations and pattern matching. We forget just how vast and varied we humans can be.

The price of free

The ad-driven Internet has done more than compress our creativity – it’s transformed our perception of value. Remember when we used to pay for media? Like CDs and DVDs? “It’s human nature to take things for granted, and after a decade-plus of access to virtually limitless free media, most consumers have little appetite to pay for it,” Shawn Reynaldo writes in his First Floor newsletter.

“That’s made life for publications and journalists exceedingly hard, and has left many of us in the profession with a choice: we can either give away or [sic] work for free, in hopes of reaching as many people as possible, or we can intentionally limit access via subscriptions and other paywalls, knowing that even our highest-quality output will probably be seen by only a relatively privileged few.”

That conundrum is all too familiar for all content creators, including music artists, who must grapple with streaming platforms designed to drive us toward aesthetic sameness, and with a freemium pricing model that has somehow duped the world into thinking it’s normal to pay the price of one CD per month for access to virtually all of the music in the world.

It hasn’t been that long since we paid for things! It hasn’t been that long since most of us read music blogs and bought CDs. We did it willingly, passionately, reveling in the ritual. And to its credit, on-chain music has sought to resurrect that passion. Music non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – amongst other functions, not all of them great – are an attempted reversion to saner pricing, a re-normalization of direct transactions, where “I made something that you want, so you pay me for it.”

The blockchain, of course, unlocks concepts like decentralization and disintermediation in ways that rid us of middle people and enable direct transactions. But it also reintroduces the now dreaded “spending of money.” Ads make the Internet “free” – do enough people care enough to start paying for media again, to enable that decentralized and direct digital world? Or is this good enough?

There are some guiding lights. The music discovery site Hype Machine just replaced programmatic ad units with artwork from Zora and tracks on FutureTape, an on-chain music aggregator created by Hype Machine founder, Anthony Volodkin. It’s a great example of someone in web3 putting their money where their mouth is.

But it’s money that’s still complicating the ecosystem. The emergence of the blockchain means that everything can be financialized, and many web3 music platforms have leaned into this narrative as a salve to web2 woes, but profitable businesses are hard to come by — there is a growing graveyard of web3 startups — perhaps because the viable model doesn’t resemble the ones we’re used to. And perhaps, also, because we aren’t leaning into the music enough. As David Turner wrote recently in his Penny Fractions newsletter: “None of these address the core means of how listeners connect with artists; everything asks for your wallet first, and passion second…”

The potential is there – NFTs’ infinite composability enables worldbuilding in ways that could once again map experience with expression, edges at all. Builders should be invoking that same composability, because our models and platforms and the ways in which we interact online require transformation. We can’t design decentralized, disintermediated systems and expect them to operate with the same economics. Let’s consider leaning into the “three-legged stool” vision espoused by UMass Amherst’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure – a “pluriverse” of interoperable Very Small Online Platforms (VSOPs) that empowers edge, and thereby engenders community. This is essential, because subculture — the drift away from the mid — emerges around (and because of) those edges. That’s where the passion lies, and that’s worth paying for.

Coda

Before he died, and just after he’d finished scoring Arrival, I interviewed the Icelandic film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. And while the music he created for the Denis Villeneuve film is near perfect, my favorite Jóhannsson release is his first album, Englaborn, "a dark, very disturbing play about domestic violence," he told me. "It was dealing with very ugly things—the worst in the nature of man. My reaction to it was to try to write the most beautiful music that I could."

Humans are resilient and expressive, and capable of terrible and wonderful things. And Jóhannsson’s music is testament to the fact that, even in the face of our worst nature, we can choose to create beauty.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. Thanks for being here.